Friday, December 21, 2007

"Virtual Manuscript Room" – Call for Collaborative Thinking!

We have mentioned the "Virtual Manuscript Room" (VMR) previously on this blog, in our report from SBL (IGNTP presentation). Now Ulrich Schmid has asked me to post the call below, related to the VMR on our blog. In addition to responses sent directly to Ulrich and Martin (e-mailaddresses below), I also take the opportunity to encourage comments and discussion of the VMR on this blog.

Virtual Manuscript Room – call for collaborative thinking!

Since November 2007 Dr. Martin Faßnacht and Dr. Ulrich Schmid have been working at the “Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung“ (Münster) on the “Virtual Manuscript Room“ (VMR), a web- based service that integrates digital images of (Greek) New Testament manuscripts with related information and electronic transcriptions. The core tool to achieve that goal will be a database containing all the relevant data pertaining to the items included.

The first and most important step when devising such a database is a thorough and comprehensive definition of the tasks that the application has to perform. An essential step towards that goal is to know what potential users and contributors will require, and in particular what searches they are likely to want to perform on the assembled information. For example:

- For which mss are photographic reproductions on the internet available?

- Which mss, that have been found in Egypt, are currently housed in the British Library?

- Which mss, dated up to the 5th century, are bilinguals, contain text of Matthew and are not written on papyrus?

Feel free to add your own questions and return them to us, preferably before 1 February 2008!